Like Being a Junkie

I have a good freelance job right now, working against a deadline with some creative people. It's all covered by an NDA (a non-disclosure agreement, I am learning contractor jargon) and the hours are very long. It's tough, interesting stuff. I get up, I work, I go to bed. Part of that is because I still get tired. I'm told that chemo effects like fatigue can plague people for a couple of years. Most of the time I do fine, but other people on the project routinely pull fourteen hours. If I do that, as I did yesterday, I pay today with a kind of physical depletion.

But it turns out that having a realy involving interesting job like this is a lot like having Hodgkins in that it has become pretty much my whole life. From the end of November until sometime in June, all I could think about was cancer cancer cancer. Now all I can think about is job job job. This job, in fact, finishes up just about the time that last year I was diagnosed. When I was in college and I took psychology, one of the theories of drug addiction was that, say, being a heroine addict simplified your life down to feeding your habit. Hodgkins simplified my life in one direction. The project has simplified it in another.

Which means that Nov. 2004 to Nov. 2005 is among the most intense twelve years of my life. Up there with the year in China--which also had the strange combination of being a little like a jail sentence and a little like the most mind-stretching book or class I've ever taken. Up there with the first year I lived in New York City. I was 23 and in some ways it was the year I became an adult.

So I apologize for not posting more. I hope to post the state of my hair (crewcut) complete with pictures, very soon.